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Automated Application Discovery for IT Operations

Fixstream application discovery capability dynamically discover all the application entities including the application services such as your app servers, web servers, database and the flows between them. Using that concept, the platform has the ability to quickly discover the different business application context by logically grouping the interconnected application flows an allowing you to give you the name that will present the business application. For example, if you want to create an application map where MySQL is one of the key entities simply select MySQL as the starting point it will go to all the different discovered application flows and it will run a clustering algorithm. Whereby it will understand how is MySQL talking to different entities and if it’s at the point where there are no additional flows. And, based on that algorithm, the platform returns back a set of applications flows grouped together that will represent a business context. All you have to do is give it a name and once you do that then all the underlined infrastructure entities across compute, storage, and network are pulled together to build a very intelligent and dynamic application map. For example, these are all the different flows and connected groups that are analyzed. All the groups are represented back to you. For example, I want to inspect this particular group where by mySQL instances are in here and they’re talking to different Tomcat application server entities and Apache. All I have to do now is click on the create application and at this point you can also inspect all the different services and the host name and make an adjustment by removing any application services from an existing server or removing the entire application and the server as well and then give it a name. And that’s all it takes to build the application map.

Similarly if I go back now to the application tab you will see the demo app is being created by clicking on that you can see all the data the iMAN is in the process of getting created. Let me take one of the pre-existing examples like the e-commerce business process which is similarly created by putting different application maps for every application that is a part of an ecommerce business process. So this is an application map for a business process application group. So if I click on ecommerce which runs on multiple applications you will see a detailed application map for the business process. Whereby on the bottom left pane and see all the different services which are part of the e-commerce business process and what VMs they are running on and what hypervisor they are stored on. Likewise you can also look at the storage map that maps the VMs to the storage lun and any controller volume they are mounted on in this case server and storage device. You can also look at the flows to present how the services are connected to each other in the E-commerce business process context. On the right hand side you will see how the VMs in the e-commerce application service were deployed, how they’re connected with the virtual and the physical network.

By clicking on any of the application flows in the flow map the platform also compute the available part for that application flow to show you what are the different parts the application flow can take to communicate from the source of the destination services. Once the map is built, the platform will collect all the operational data from different sources and it will correlate on top of the map in context with business process and it stores the data in a time-series database. By clicking on any of the overlay icon you can also quickly see the different alert corresponding to different flows and and the path and you can drill down into that and understand all of the details about that particular alert. Now the alerts, and the fault, and the log events are all stored in a time-series database and then the event correlation tab does an analysis of all the event in context with the business process in times-series. Where by you can go back in time like a DVR function and you can inspect all the different events in sequence to identify repeating patterns that might be causing issues in the application environment. For example, this left-hand side pane shows you all the different events that has happened from the selected from-to date. I can go back in time time and see different events and alerts on the application snapshot that shows you how the application for payment was and what the individual event that was taking place at any given point of time. Now I can also overlay this event correlation window where by the platform is going to do now autoplay the events in sequence to identify a repeating pattern. For example, every Monday you have a sequence of events that’s happening right by the network bandwidth condition is driving such incidents as database slow down, application failures, and the transactions are failing. It will detect if it’s happening every Monday and show you the repeating pattern that some action needs to be taken to solve it.

And that’s how the application insights are built using all the relationship data, the topology data, the application discovery that is done by the platform to give you a very detailed intuitive application environments that can be used to do root cause analysis, suppressing unnecessary events and noise which allows you to get to the root of the problem very, very quickly and minimizing meantime to resolve and detect issues from multiple hours to minutes. Thank you.